


there's not a word yet

by beholder



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, M/M, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), background benverly, background bike, background stanpat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:35:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29914242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beholder/pseuds/beholder
Summary: They make their way out of the house on Neibolt street like river water, impossible to catch with the rush of it, filtering between falling rocks and rotting wood like it’s second nature to navigate catastrophe.The bones of the structure collapse around them like a monster of myth but they’ve escaped the jaws and the teeth and the labyrinth again and they’ve done it together, so they run.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	there's not a word yet

They make their way out of the house on Neibolt street like river water, impossible to catch with the rush of it, filtering between falling rocks and rotting wood like it’s second nature to navigate catastrophe. The bones of the structure collapse around them like a monster of myth, but they’ve escaped the jaws and the teeth and the labyrinth again and they’ve done it together, so they run.

Seven figures come bursting out through the front door, rolling onto the dead grass before the house pulls itself back into the earth. Secrets buried, whispers silenced, horrors banished.

It’s the first time in several hours where there’s a moment to breathe.

It’s the first time in several days where there’s a moment to break into exhausted laughter.

The sun is bright in the sky when they gather together, a perfect set of seven, sprawled on the dead lawn of a dead house like any other heady summer day in their youth. Foreheads pressed together and laughter so layered that it’s impossible to tell where one voice stops and another starts.

Eddie’s pushed against Richie’s right side, Stan on his left, both tucked under the breadth of his shoulders and all of them flocked together. A circle made whole.

The losers club of 1989 does a haggard victory lap around the sprawling expanse of Derry, Maine before making their way back to the townhouse a triumphant collective.

Everyone spreads out across the living room, draped over furniture and each other and for the first time in years, surrounded by people he never knew he missed, Richie lets himself think about the future.

He’s not unaccustomed to wanting, he wants often but wanting and having are two very different things and he’s not unaccustomed to that stark realization either.

He’s gotten so out of practice over the years with getting things that he only knows how to weather the storm of wanting them, so often caught in the space between something permanent and something fleeting.

He’s never asked anyone to stay before (not that he could remember until recently anyway). Wanted it sure, ached for it often, but was never willing to risk the rejection enough to voice the question at the end of the day. For a man so well known for voices, Richie seems to lose track of the one hardwired to the truth often, burying the lede seems easier.

He wants to ask Eddie now.

Wants to ask him to stay, to ask him to leave together, to ask if the kiss that broke him out of the deadlights so deep under the earth that the light couldn’t reach them means the same thing as the question that keeps getting tangled in his teeth.

He wants to say “Hey Eds, can a man live without a heart? I lost track of mine for 27 years but I think I’ve found it again.”

He feels the tip of his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth before he can push the words out into the sunset gold of the air. For a fleeting moment the thought strikes that if he speaks them aloud they’ll hang there, like snowflakes or dust motes, suspended and terrifyingly visible.

The distance between Richie, sitting on the floor, his hand close enough to thumb over the point of Eddie’s anklebone and Eddie, behind him leaning against the armrest feels like miles.

He remembers now, growing up and feeling all too small and all too large at once. Awkward edges never quite folding in enough to fit the premeditated chalk outline of a person that Derry had demanded of all of them.

He had grown up with just enough overhang left to be picked at, always halfway healed like a scab peeled off too early, oozing and raw and sensitive to the touch. People knew that about him, like they could smell it on him and that made him an easy target because sure, he could spit words as fast as anyone but if you sent them back his way they’d bruise, like stones.

He remembers biking up to see Mike with the others on the weekends, fields sprawled out all around the house in the center. How the wind pushed through the grass and would move it in waves, the edge of the porch borne on that movement for a moment like a ship on the water. 

He remembers poring over tapes together, listening to love songs in the hayloft and mourning lost things in the dull spilling of the starlight through the slats in the roof.

They’d all always been good at interpreting each other’s signals too, he remembers that now.  
  
Ripples coalescing like they’d taken a leap of faith together again, like they could sense where the others were in the blue-green water of the quarry without even opening their eyes. 

Richie used to joke about echolocating when he would lose his glasses but now he finds the appeal in it, in the idea of knowing without seeing, in trusting the feeling of closeness without asking for empirical proof.

He rests his chin on his palm, elbow propped on his knee and watches the room unfold around him, alight with the people he’s lost and loved and found again.

They were gone from each other long enough he’d tried to accept that maybe there were some spaces in him that would never be filled. Had tried to make peace with the idea that maybe everyone existed with these chasms inside of them, they just never brought it up. That maybe people understood what he meant when he finally voiced that concern, even if they pretended they didn’t.

Maybe everyone knew hurt like this and because they all felt it to some degree, that would mean it was survivable, that it could heal. 

Now he looks at Beverly’s fingers threaded through Ben’s, smoothing over his knuckles with her thumb while he nudges his knee against hers, flush high on his cheeks. At Bill and Mike with their shoulders tilted towards each other, sharing warmth and the loveseat, pinkies twined together like a promise on the cushion between them.

At Stan facetiming his wife, turning the screen outward to the room in introduction, the line of his mouth softening with the shift and timbre of Patty’s voice through the speakers, love brightening his eyes.

And the lights are on sure, but there’s affection lighting the room too. Making it into something incandescent and limned at the edges, softer.

He tilts his head back to look at Eddie behind him and finds Eddie already looking. 

His eyebrows are low and his jaw is set in that steadfast way it always was when they were kids. It’s like looking at two images layered for a moment, the same eyes, the same thin mouth but that flickers away quickly, gone in a flash as the notable changes show through like a still on a lightbox. The sharper cut of Eddie's jaw, the wrinkles amassing between his eyebrows, the bandage clinging to his left cheek. Indicators that time has passed and they all have the wear and tear to prove it.

Richie huffs out a laugh and lets his eyes sink shut, the furrowed brow was always the first step in an elaborate dance. Richie would say something, Eddie’s eyebrows would sink low on his forehead like storm clouds and he would spit something back. Richie would laugh at the spit and Eddie would spit more at the laughing until they tumbled to the ground in a flurry of limbs, laughing and spitting in tandem, tangled up together.

But Richie’s never been good at dancing, he shot up too quickly in the summertime and always had two left feet come fall soirees. No Sadie Hawkins, no homecoming, no prom.

Just Richie. Sometimes with his favorite people in the world and sometimes not, navigating all their respective dances like stepping stones.

The night rolls endlessly around them now, encapsulating the room and separating it from the rest of the world.

It’s 3AM and Stan is dozing on the couch, the elbow patches on the sweater draped over his chest are glaringly visible to Richie, who will not pass up the opportunity to call him old in as many ways as possible in the morning. 

Bev is the self-declared, community accepted arbiter over the arm wrestling happening in the center of the room. Sitting cross legged on the floor next to the footrest turned elbow-rest, confirming wins and losses as they play out accordingly.  
  


At half past four Eddie stands, citing exhaustion and offers his hand to Richie in the process and once he’s taken it they’re both fully upright, side-by-side as always.  
  
Eddie turns to him then, eyes bright with knowing, smile tilting as wide and as sharp as he can manage without popping his stitches and says “Hey Rich, wanna get out of here?”

Richie's heart unspools then, spilling out from between his ribs as he pulls Eddie into his arms, hand coming up to cup the base of his skull and whispers an affirmative into his hair like a secret. 

It doesn’t matter what destination Eddie’s asking about, upstairs, New York, L.A., the moon. Richie’ll go if Eddie asks. If Eddie opens the door, Richie will cross the threshold shoulder-to-shoulder with him, it’s a universal constant.

Water is wet, the earth circles the sun, Richie Tozier would walk with Eddie Kaspbrak to the edge of the earth.

Eddie pulls back, just enough to see his face. To wipe his thumb over the tear tracks under Richie’s glasses and to press their lips together a second time, surrounded by their friends and the ugliest couches on earth like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

And later, after divorces are filed and finished, after battles of all kinds are won and clowns rightfully killed, after proposals are made and accepted. They dance at their wedding, surrounded by just as many friends but also by significantly less ugly couches and it’s perfect.  
  
Their swaying is unpracticed and Eddie keeps stepping on his feet but Richie just throws his head back and laughs, the rush of air spurred upward and out of his lungs by the disbelief that they get to have this.

That this is his life, surrounded by people he loves and being loved in return.

Eddie catches his eye the same way he always has and, in a motion he’s learned now by repetition rather than daydream, Richie meets him halfway for a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday Richie!


End file.
